For some parts of the country, warmer weather has arrived. Now you can plan to do you daily exercise outdoors. Exercising outdoors can give you the benefit of Vitamin D absorption from the sun which, by the way, helps increase energy. Also the outdoors offers a change in scenery which can improve your enjoyment and motivation. Actually, with proper clothing, outdoor exercise can be enjoyed in cooler climates and can add something new and exciting to your Balanced Life program.
Here some tips that I've found helpful in helping sculpt my upper body.
You may have benched 250 pounds back in the day, but it’s important that you shape your workout to fit your fitness level right now. Don’t hoist more weight than your joints are ready to lift. Start low and work up to heavier weights gradually. Different muscle groups will require different amounts of weight.
Choose a weight that is heavy enough to challenge your target muscles, but not so heavy that your joints feel strained. Start with dumbbells that are at least 8 to 10 pounds and gradually work up to using 10 to 20 pounds or more, depending on the exercise.
If you are new to lifting weights, or have not done so for six months or longer, then build a base level of strength for eight to 12 weeks by doing one to two sets of eight to 12 reps of each exercise, two to three days per week. Rest for two to three minutes in between each set of each exercise.
Once you have a base level of strength, perform two to three sets of eight to 12 repetitions of each exercise. Rest for one to two minutes in between each set of reps. Do this workout two to three times a week with a rest day in between.
I hear excuses all the time as to why people don't exercise; however, there should be no excuse except for extreme situations. Here are a couple of reasons I heard earlier this week and reasons why they are poor excuses.
Excuse: I've tried to exercise in the past and failed
Don't throw in the towel! You can't see it when you lower your cholesterol or reduce your risk of diabetes, but that doesn't mean you aren't doing yourself a great favor. Re-evaluate what went wrong, and learn from your mistakes.
Pace yourself. Start small and build up to more intense workouts later, when your body is ready.
Set realistic goals. Don't promise yourself you're going to work out for an hour every day, and then get down on yourself when you fall short. Stick with goals you can more easily achieve, such as exercising 20 minutes a day, three days a week for the first month.
Remember why you're exercising. Use your personal fitness goals as motivation — and reward yourself as you meet your goals.
Excuse: I can't afford to buy fancy exercise equipment or join a health club
You don't need a membership at an elite gym to get a great workout. Consider common-sense alternatives.
Do strengthening exercises at home. Use inexpensive resistance bands — lengths of elastic tubing available in varying strengths — in place of weights. Lift plastic milk jugs partially filled with water or sand. Do push-ups or squats using your body weight.
Queue up an exercise video. Try videos on dance aerobics, cardio-kickboxing, yoga or tai chi. For variety, trade exercise videos with a friend or check out the options at your local library or video rental store.
Start a walking group. Round up friends, neighbors or co-workers for regular group walks. Plan routes through your neighborhood or near your workplace, along local parks and trails, or in a nearby shopping mall.
Take the stairs. Skip the elevator when you can. Better yet, make climbing stairs a workout in itself.
Try your community center. Exercise classes offered at your community center or recreation department or through your local community education group might fit your budget better than an annual gym membership.
One of my favorite commercials on TV is the one where Peyton Manning gives the advise for men 25 yrs and up to wear bigger shirts. I know Manning does way too many commercials, but that one is really funny to me. That has nothing to do with this post by the way.
I just read an article on MSN and I thought it was pretty interesting. Below is basically what it says:
Guidelines to making the best decisions in the gym.
-Train on your feet. Sitting is an unnatural body position for strenuous work. Once you sit, you lose your body's natural anchor: the muscles of the back, butt, abdominal core, and legs. Ground-based training immediately puts an end to a host of outdated stationary-machine and free-weight lifts, including the bench press, military press, incline press, and chest press, and leg extensions, leg presses, leg curls, preacher curls, and so on. You'll find that staying on your feet keeps your heart rate up, requires you to think creatively, and keeps your workout moving along efficiently. You're either exercising or walking it off. That keeps your awareness up and boredom down.
-Vary your pace. Stationary running or cycling can become a semiconscious plod, anesthetized by television. Structuring tempo builds aerobic capacity, burns calories more efficiently, builds strength, and helps develop the ability to absorb force while in motion. Tempo changes do not have to be intense, only clearly drawn, whether you alternate 30-second efforts or do an "inverted pyramid" of descending durations of effort. Mentally, varying your tempo makes the time go by faster as well. With alternating durations of effort, you are pushing, recovering, or holding steady, and never simply tuning out.
-Train movements, not muscles. The five basic movements to develop in any exercise session are limited to different forms of stepping, pushing, pulling, squatting, and rotating. There's no need to do one exercise for your biceps, another for your shoulders, and another for your chest. Two good pushing drills take care of them all. Instead of targeting the upper back and then the lower back, simply pull (in the form of pull-ups or incline pull-ups) and bridge (holding your torso stiff to build strength in your back). For the lower body, lunge, step-down, and squat drills are all it takes, and body weight alone is usually more than enough load.
-Train for the four elements: stopping, slowing, descending/ascending, and catching. Many gyms don't value the reduction of force — the catching of a ball, landing from a step-down, or changing direction — because there's no easy way to measure it. Yet stopping, descending, and absorbing momentum are far more valuable for joint safety than any isolated strength-building exercise. This means not only throwing a medicine ball but also catching each return throw or rebound. It means stepping downward on one leg, running downhill, developing footwork agility, and squatting or lunging with control.
-Prepare to use the distant corners of your gym. Since gyms are not often set up for clients who move their bodies across space or in multiple directions, who toss weighted balls, or who need to do drills that require stopping and starting quickly, a more athletically based use of your health club will often require taking over its less populated areas. Empty basketball courts, aerobics classrooms, and other open areas are necessary in order to train dynamically indoors, so get used to feeling like a pioneer on the prairie.
There are many benefits of daily physical activity...too many to mention. For times sake and simply because I don't want to write that much, I've listed a few of, what I think, are the most important. Take time to read ant think about each one and how they coud, or would, improve your life:
Exercise improves your mood.
Exercise combats chronic diseases.
Exercise helps you manage your weight.
Exercise strengthens your heart and lungs.
Exercise promotes better sleep.
Exercise can put the spark back into your sex life:)
Exercise can be - gasp - fun!
Now they aren't in any specific order. Let me know what you think and why you believe physical activity is important.
Even the minor injuries suffered while working out can cause major problems. I've come up with a list of 5 things to do to try to avoid injuries in the gym.
1) Always perform a thorough warmup.
A proper warmup is the single best thing you can do to minimize your risk of injury. This simple 15-20 minute process will prepare your mind and body for the hard work to come by increasing blood flow into the surrounding connective tissue and by lubricating your joints. I would recommend that you perform 5 minutes of light cardiovascular exercise before each workout followed by 4-5 warmup sets for your first major exercise of the routine.
2) Always train with proper form.
This should go without saying. Every exercise that you perform in the gym should be done with proper form and technique in order to keep the stress off of your joints. If you start squatting or deadlifting with a rounded back, jerking the weights around in a ballistic manner or performing dangerous exercises you are almost guaranteed to hurt yourself at some point.
3) Always train within your own personal limits.
Weightlifting is a personal battle, and letting your ego take over is almost always a recipe for disaster. It doesn’t matter what the guy next to you is benching and it is completely irrelevant to your training program. You must always use weights that you can handle and control with proper form, and if you start piling on the plates to impress the people around you, you’ll be stretching your limits and putting yourself in a very vulnerable position.
4) Always know when to quit.
If you cannot complete another rep of an exercise using proper form, the set is over, plain and simple. Put the weight down and rest up for your next set. If you start using huge amounts of momentum and jerky body motions to crank out a couple of extra reps, you’ll be on the sidelines before you know it.
5) Never ignore your aches and pains.
When you’re motoring along through a training program and are making progress from week to week, the idea of quitting just seems impossible. This can sometimes lead us to ignore those obvious injuries and pretend as if they aren’t really there as we often “work through” the pain and hope that it magically disappears.
In a nutshell, it's a simple law of energy intake and expenditure. Eating more than you are using means you gain weight. Burning more than your eating means you lose weight... Unfortunately the real outworking of this is not so simple. Losing fat (for most people) is hard -- get used to the idea then you won't struggle so much with disappointment.
There are 5 principles to keep in mind - Diet (Nutrition), Cardio (Exercise), Dedication (Consistency), Goals, Weight training. It is possible to lose fat with correct diet alone (for some people) - but the best chance of success will be to apply all these principles. Even the perfect diet plan can fail if you cannot stick to it.
Fad Diet: The diet that promotes a restricted eating-plan or certain liquid foods lacking sufficient food value is termed as Fad Diet. The fad diets are very low in calories so they cause quite fast weight loss. However, quick weight loss may not be healthy and - in most cases - is not fat loss. It is actually water-loss which is quickly regained when the dieter resumes normal eating. The fad diets can cause weight cycling, so fad dieting is also dubbed as ‘Yo-Yo dieting’, which means a continuing pattern of gaining and losing weight. The fad diets are considered unhealthy. The common examples of Fad diets include the Cabbage Soup Diet and the Grapefruit Diet.
Good Weight Loss Diet: The diet that helps losing weight in a positive manner is a good Weight Loss Diet. It does not reduce the energy. A balanced low fat diet is considered as the best weight loss diet. A balanced low fat diet is high in healthy carbohydrates, low in fat and moderate in protein.
A good Weight Loss Diet should be rich in whole grains, fruits, and vegetables, which are specially recommended for weight control and preventing diseases such as cancer and heart disease.
If you like working out but don't have much time, here is a suggestion.
In your weight training routine, you don't have to work all your target areas at once. Instead, work one area a day for about 20 minutes. For example, your program might look like this:
• Monday: Chest and Back Weight Training for 20 min.
• Tuesday: Shoulder Strength Exercise for 20 min.
• Wednesday: Abs Weight Training for 20 min.
• Thursday: Biceps and Triceps Strength Training for 20 min.
• Friday: Grab Bag/Wild Card for 20 min.
• Saturday: Hip and Thigh Weight Training for 20 min.
• Sunday: Chest and Shoulder Strength Training for 20 min.
Choose a set of exercises for each day and follow your weight training program. You can vary it, especially as you add more reps to your arm curls, incline chest presses, shoulder presses, and kickbacks. Remember, you don't have to devote countless hours to working out to look and feel good.
That sounds simple enought, right? Well it is, but there are ways you can walk that makes exercising more effective and efficient. You can't walk with the intentions of toning and losing weight the same way you casually walk around the house or the office. I've put together a list of techniques that you can do to help when you're walking for exercise. You may think these are crazy, but here they are.
-Bend your elbows. This will cause your arms to swing faster which in return will help your legs to move faster.
-Keep your stride short. Don't take long strides that feel awkward.
-Think heal-to-toe. Push-off with your heal. Toes should leave the ground last.
-Keep your abs pulled in and tight.
-Include interval training walks that include periods of very brisk walking followed by slower, recovery times.
-Remember to always stretch and warm-up.
When exercising, we rarely think about balance, but it is a very important part. I've tried to be more conscience about focusing a little more on my balance. Sometimes I'll to curls while standing on one foot, or simly just stand and walk on a beam. I recently read an article online in which Harvey W. Wallmann, a doctor of physical therapy science and an associate professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, talks about the importance of balance in everday life. He said, "you use balance all the time, picking up children, stepping up on a curb, or walking over rocks." Some suggestions he gives to improve balance are:
Single-leg stand.
Stand with your legs slightly less than shoulder-width apart near a support such as a wall or railing. Balance as you lift one leg, and then close your eyes. Maintain your balance for 30 to 60 seconds, and repeat with the other leg.
Trunk turns.
Stand with your legs slightly wider than shoulder-width apart on a mini trampoline. (No mini trampoline? A soft gym mat or other squishy surface will also work.) Hold an exercise ball or a 5 or 10 pound weight in both hands, chest high. Twist at your trunk to face your right, return to center then twist to your left and back to center. Repeat 10 to 20 times.
Single-leg squat.
Stand on a sturdy 6- to 8-inch-high stool or step, with your right leg off the stool to the side. Bend your left leg as you do a squat until your right leg barely touches the ground. Do two sets of five to 10 reps on each leg.
March in the dark.
In a room with plenty of space and no obstacles that could bump knees or cause you to trip, march in place 60 to 100 steps with your eyes closed.
I'm all of the time reading tips on how to be healthier, how to improve my workout, etc. This morning I was reading some health tips I thought were interesting. I just thought I'd share a few. Check out the one about how to reduce stress. I thought those was interesting.
To Improve Nutrition:
1. Buy whole foods -- whether canned, frozen, or fresh from the farm -- and use them
in place of processed foods whenever possible.
2. Reject foods and drinks made with corn syrup, a calorie-dense, nutritionally
empty sweetener that many believe is worse for the body than sugar, says Katz.
3. Start each dinner with a mixed green salad. Not only will it help reduce your
appetite for more caloric foods, but it also will automatically add veggies to
your meal.
To Improve Physical Fitness:
1. Do a squat every time you pick something up. Instead of bending over in the usual
way, which stresses the lower back, bend your knees and squat. This forces you to
use your leg muscles and will build strength.
2. Every time you stop at a traffic light (or the bus does), tighten your thighs and
butt muscles and release as many times as you can. (Don't worry, no one will see
it!) This will firm leg and buttock muscles, improve blood flow.
3. Whenever you're standing on a line, lift one foot a half-inch off the ground. The
extra stress on your opposite foot, ankle, calf and thigh, plus your buttocks,
will help firm and tone muscles. Switch feet every few minutes.
To Improve Stress Control:
1. Give your partner a hug every day before work.
2. Have a good cry. It can boost your immune system, reduce levels of stress
hormones, eliminate depression, and help you think more clearly.
3. Twice a day, breathe deeply for three to five minutes
To Improve Sleep:
1. Sprinkle just-washed sheets and pillowcases with lavender water. The scent has
been shown in studies to promote relaxation, which can lead to better sleep.
2. Buy a new pillow.
3. Eat a handful of walnuts before bed. You'll be giving yourself a boost of fiber
and essential fatty acids along with the amino acid tryptophan -- a natural sleep-
inducer.
Being a sports fan, I've noticed how many more professional athletes--specifically baseball players--seem to get hurt easier than they use to. The majority of them, however, are so much bigger than they use to be. Listening to one of my favorite pitchers of all time, Greg Maddux, I now completely understand why. It's not rocket science.
The answer he gave is true for everybody who exercises. Maddux explained that, whenever he was coming up as a baseball player, flexibility was a big thing. Today, during the home run era, strenght is the big thing. Players are strong, but less flexible; this is a big reason for more strained muscles and such.
Remember when you're exercising, always do a quick warm-up and stretch. While being strong and cut is cool, if you're constantly hurting it doesn't mean much. Just exercise smart.
I bet I've lost five pounds in sweat in the past couple of days. No, I didn't go to a suana unless that's what you call central Georgia. I've been helping my dad tear down an old outbuilding he had in his backyard. It was over thirty years old and was about half rotted down. At least it was cooler this week. The heat index was only around 95 to 97 instead of the 105 to 107 it was last week. Still with 100% humidity you do a lot of sweating. It was good exercise and it made up for the lack of good eating and activities that I have left off due to being extremely busy at work. Anyway, my dad appreciated the help and that reminds me, Happy Father's Day to all you fathers out there.
Well, I hate to sound like I'm whining to you guys, but I'm a little stressed out. As you might remember from one my previous posts, one of our employees left us for another job last Friday. Well, another employee has now given her resignation. That cuts our office staff in half. It is the busy time of the month on top of all that. We all know what stress does to one's eating habits. I've caught myself snacking when I'm not even really hungry. I've got to do better. I'm going to start trying breathing exercises and just take it one day at a time. Please keep me in mind and I hope things start looking up here at work.
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